ANT E105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Manuel Gamio, Historical Particularism, Valley Of Mexico
Document Summary
Lived, worked during the mexican revolution (1911-1920) Criticized enumerative statistics, because it didn"t tell the government enough about the culture of the people ( needs and aspirations ). Called for a return to general, useful statistics. The necessities of a people cannot be determined, nor can its improvement be procured without knowing its statistics. Statistics is a systematic integration of the economic, ethnological, biological, etc. , etc. , characteristics of human individuals and groups. Knowledge of these characteristics leads to knowledge of the necessities of the population, and suggests the measures to alleviate them . Vast archive of information on all the worlds peoples and cultures. Criticized this tendency in anthropology to unite territory, people, culture into discrete objects: cultures . Anthropology too often fails to understand interconnectedness. A model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.
